Distributed situation awareness for C2 platforms

In this paper we describe our progress in deriving and demonstrating requirements and guiding the design of command and control (C2) decision aids to include distributed situation awareness. At the heart of C2 decision aids are the tools and algorithms necessary to plan operations, assess the availability and capability of assigned resources to carry out their tasks, and monitor the execution of the plan. Situation awareness capabilities require additional tools and algorithms which serve to improve the verification and validation of the operational C2 process, thereby increasing the level of robustness inherent in the planning, assessment and monitoring capabilities. In essence, situation awareness is built-in to ensure that semi-autonomous assets maintain task synchronization within allowed (planning) uncertainties, while execution of tasks may deviate from the nominal trajectories prescribed by a plan. Such deviations cannot be allowed to proceed unchecked and without warning should certain thresholds be exceeded. Specifically, this paper describes a situation awareness model and algorithm which address the envelope of uncertainties associated with key platform dynamics. These include: (a) models for expectations and uncertainties associated with position, actions, and the consumption of supplies, (b) algorithms to compute platform compliance with a planned course-of-action (CoA), and (c) protocols for dealing with platform non-compliant CoA.